Paper short abstract:

Northern Cameroon, Northern Chad, slave descendant; slave villages; achievement of emancipation, low status citizens, stigma of slavery; migration in the urban areas; Settlements; the “enslaving” status. .

Paper long abstract:

From Village to Town. Itineraries and Identity of Slave Descendants settling in the Cities in Cameroon and Chad.

Adam Mahamat, PhD

Department of History

University of Maroua, Cameroon

Email: adammj2002@yahoo.fr

In Northern Cameroon and Northern Chad, the issue of being a slave descendant is crucial. Former inhabitants of slave villages like Mikiri, Gayak, Kourgui, Massaguets, Massenya despite the achievement of emancipation, are still reported to belong to the low status citizens. They hardly overcome the stigma of slavery in their day-to-day life. The moving from the village (Roumde) to the town (Wouro) failed to change the perception of people around them.

Settlements in Maroua, Garoua, Mora (Cameroon) and in N'Djamena (Chad) are meant to erase the "enslaving" status. The interactions between the different actors make the perceptions much more complicated in a mixing environment.

Case studies of conflicting conditions, chosen in Cameroon and Chad, discloses the apparent co-existence. The hidden existence of these "citizens" is likely to revisit the moving identity of the descendants of the "bazinguers" (captives and soldiers of Rabih Fadl Allah, killed in 1900) in the lake Chad basin. Their local distribution in N'Djamena town indicates the different origins and the various domains in which they operate.

Key Words: Slave Descendant, Itineraries, Moving Identity, Urban Areas, Cameroon, Chad.